The Cost of Course Development
The origin story.
When Curriculus was first developed, we designed it around the consumer space, where anyone could go deep on whatever topic they could dream of (for me, that was building a structured curriculum around improvising electric guitar on top of melodic tech house). And while I thoroughly enjoyed what I was reading (and learning), I noticed my wife, a professor, slogging away on her own course development - night after night, and summer day after summer day. I noticed where her energy was drained and where she was having fun. It turns out that so much of what I had built for myself had direct applications to changing her world. So, over the next three months, we adapted the original platform to focus on augmenting her expertise rather than building everything from scratch. After four rewrites and overhauls of the platform, that’s when I started hearing something different from her. “Holy &@*!, this is amazing”. And now, three months after that that comment, we’re at a point where Curriculus is making a big change in how instructors and course designers do their work.
So, what’s different with Curriculus?
Put simply, you spend more time enjoying your work.
When you can build or revise a course in days, it means you have an entirely different outlook on course development. If you assume that everyone dedicates 2 months to course development, then under the current process, half of that time is consumed by manual organization work. If Curriculus removes all that overhead, that doesn’t mean that course development will naturally fall to 1 month. Rather, what actually happens is (and we’ve seen this with our own eyes), instructors and course designers will spend the same amount or even more time on designing the course itself, because they’re no longer spending all their energy going uphill. Curriculus takes care of the “uphill” part of developing a course. In other words, a marathon is a marathon. But running one through redwood trees and rolling hills is far more enjoyable than running one alongside a traffic-jammed highway. Curriculus takes away the hard parts of course design.
Why is instructional design and course design hard?
Ever wonder how much time it actually takes to build a course from scratch? For a full semester course, anywhere between 2-5 months. his is exactly why you’ll find instructors and course designers burning the midnight oil or giving up their summers, just to get courses ready. There’s simply not enough time in the regular workday to make it all happen. When a course takes months to develop, incorporating new research costs additional weeks of revision. Updating assessments to match revised content usually means starting over. Ensuring alignment between readings, objectives, lessons, and evaluations requires constant cross-checking, which most instructors lack the time for, given their typical 2-4 course teaching loads.
Course development and instructional design is complicated.
Every change you make in a course has a ripple effect. Update the reading for Week 7? Now you’re tweaking that week’s discussion questions, fixing Week 8’s recap (because it referenced outdated material), reworking Week 9’s scaffolding, and likely rewriting assessment questions as well.
Research on backward design implementation shows that balancing institutional standards, departmental expectations, diverse learning needs, and accurate assessment requires thoughtful integration of content knowledge, pedagogical strategies, and assessment methods. Each component affects the others, creating a web of dependencies that makes changes exponentially complex.
A changing development reality
For a long time, we assumed building a quality course had to take months of painstaking effort. But really, that just mixed up two very different jobs: the routine checks, and the actual creative work of designing how you’ll teach. Curriculus proves you can automate the routine stuff and still keep quality high.
- Traditional: 3-6 months, 200-400 hours, constant verification
- With Curriculus: 3-5 days, 6-8 hours of instructor time, automatic validation
Curriculus frees up instructors to do what they do best by handling all the nitty-gritty details that usually slow things down. It takes care of thousands of tiny checks and alignments—stuff that would take weeks if you had to do it all yourself.
So, what if there was a better way to handle all this?
Curriculus steps in here. Instead of making instructors track every single connection by hand, it keeps all those relationships organized behind the scenes. The result? You can iterate quickly while maintaining high quality, without losing your focus on the details.
Here’s how the process works out:
- Day 1: Material Submission - Share your readings, existing syllabus, and course objectives with Curriculus. The system immediately begins extracting pedagogical value from your materials.
- Day 2: First Draft Review - Receive a complete course structure with skill progressions, lesson outlines, and assessment frameworks. Provide feedback on the pedagogical approach and any adjustments needed.
- Day 3: Second Draft Refinement - Review refined lessons incorporating your feedback. The systematic architecture ensures all changes propagate correctly through related materials.
- Days 4+: Polish and Personalize - With the structural work complete, focus your time on adding personal touches, incorporating specific examples, and preparing for actual teaching.
Curriculus turns 2-4 months of structural busywork into 4 days, so you can 95% of your allotted time on the actual pedagogy and teaching instead of 50% on structure and 50% on pedagogy and teaching.
Quality through systematic design
When you separate routine tasks from actual teaching work, you maintain high quality and save a significant amount of time. Most of the hours in traditional course development are spent on tasks such as checking alignment, ensuring everything matches, tracking references, and updating materials. Important? Yes. What do instructors love to do with their limited time? Not so much.
Curriculus automates these mechanical verifications while preserving space for pedagogical expertise. The system handles:
- Automatic prerequisite chain verification
- Reference resolution and attribution
- Alignment checking between objectives and assessments
- Consistency validation across all materials
- Dependency tracking for updates
This means instructors can finally spend their energy where it counts: shaping their teaching style, connecting with students, and adapting to whatever comes up.
About Curriculus
Curriculus helps course developers and instructional designers work faster and smarter. By automating the routine checks and offering features that actually make course design easier, Curriculus lets you focus on what you do best, teaching. Want to see how it works? Check out curriculus.com.